Library News Blog

Did Bertha Barton commit suicide, taking her child with her, in the icy waters off Coney Island, or did the nefarious bigamist, Mr. Martin X. Boyce, murder her? An anonymous author wrote about Bertha’s woeful and sorrowful life in the semi-epistolary, semi-autobiographical dime novel Bertha Barton: Or. The Coney Island Mystery, published in 1876 and recently acquired by the Sealy Library in the only American edition.

Bertha went to the Twelfth Baptist church in Philadelphia to hear its pastor, the Reverend Mr. Bott, with his “sweet face and musical voice” and “persuasive way of explaining the Gospel,” preach a sermon. Mr. Bott was so eloquent that Bertha converted almost immediately.

It was at the church that she met Mr. Boyce, who seduced her, soon married her in secret (performed by a fake minister friend of Boyce) and impregnated her. Only after Bertha gave birth to Boyce’s child did she find out that he was already married. Next thing, she and her baby were found dead on the shores of Coney Island. Was it murder or suicide? Who’s to say?

This extraordinary New York mystery tale recently found its way to the Special Collections Division of the Sealy Library where it resides among our incomparable rare book collection related to crime and punishment.

Bertha is included in one volume with Life and Death in a Barn! … A True Incident of Centennial City Life. Both novels are extraordinarily rare, found in only three U.S. libraries, and sensationally detail the miseries, poverty, and crime in urban settings during the 1876 centennial year. This most germane acquisition to the collections is another indicator of Sealy Library’s comprehensive and historical coverage of crime and punishment.

Fake news. Alternative facts. Post-truth. We are living in a world where facts are easier than ever to find, yet seem to matter less than ever before. This has critical implications for our students in their academic, professional and personal lives, and is relevant in just about any course they might take in their college careers. If you are interested in learning or teaching about news and information literacy in the Digital Age, consider attending the session "News Literacy Matters" on Thursday, April 27, from 1:40 to 2:40 p.m. in the Teaching and Learning Center, 335T. Prof. Alexa Capeloto (Journalism) and Prof. Kathleen Collins (Library) will share tools, resources and activities designed for easy inclusion in your courses.

We have acquired licenses to stream 15 documentaries to the John Jay Community, for viewing on or off-campus thanks to our proxy server. URLs can be shared, e.g. via email, or embedded into course software.

Incarcerating US “is a feature-length documentary that asks fundamental questions about the prison system in America: What is the purpose of prison? Why did our prison population explode in the 1970s? What can make our justice system more just? … Through both empirical evidence and the eyes of those tragically affected by the system for committing minor crimes, we see the failures of two major initiatives: the War on Drugs and mandatory minimum sentences.”

Cocaine unwrapped. (2013). Bullfrog Films. Tells the story of "coca farmers in Colombia, drug mules in Ecuadorian prisons, cocaine factories in the Bolivian jungle, dealers on the streets of Mexico, law enforcement officials on the streets of Baltimore -- and the everyday consumers around the dinner tables of the West. It's a story of politics, death, economic and environmental devastation and human suffering, and explores realistic alternatives to the war on drugs. The film features front line reportage, exclusive access to the political leaders of Latin America, such as Evo Morales of Bolivia and Rafael Correa of Ecuador, as well as revealing interviews with drug czars."

Crips and Bloods: Made in America. (2009). Bullfrog Films. "Chronicles the decades-long cycle of destruction and despair that defines modern gang culture. From the genesis of LA's gang culture to the shocking, war-zone reality of daily life in the South L.A., it traces the origins of their bloody four-decades long feud. Contemporary and former gang members provide street-level testimony that provides the film with a stark portrait of modern-day gang life: the turf wars and territorialism, the inter-gang hierarchy and family structure, the rules of behavior, the culture of guns, death and dishonor."

Do not resist (2016). Vanish Films. Directed by Craig Atkinson. On Film Platform. A “chilling,” “urgent and powerful exploration into the militari- zation of American police forces.” It has won numerous awards, including best documentary at Tribeca’s Film festival in 2016.

Intended consequences (2008). Media Storm "In Rwanda, in 1994, Hutu militia committed a bloody genocide, murdering one million Tutsis, and repeatedly raping thousands of women. Many of these women became pregnant, and have had to try for years to reconcile their contradictory feelings of both love and hate towards the children they bore as the result of their brutal rapes. These are some of their touching stories." (15 minutes).

Red Hook Justice. (2004). Icarus Films. "Profiles an innovative court in a Brooklyn neighborhood plagued by poverty and crime that is at the center of a legal revolution - the community justice movement." (55 minutes).

Refuge. (2014). Bullfrog Films. "Refugees, asylees and caregivers share their stories to help professionals and volunteers understand the needs of the more than a million survivors of torture rebuilding lives in the US."

El Sicario, Room 164. (2011). Icarus Films. "In an anonymous motel room on the U.S./Mexico border, a Ciudad Juarez hitman speaks. He has killed hundreds of people and is an expert in torture and kidnapping. He was simultaneously on the payroll of the Mexican drug cartels and a commander of the Chihuahua State Police. …Aided only by a magic marker and notepad, which he uses to illustrate and diagram his words, the sicario describes, in astounding detail, his life of crime, murder, abduction and torture."

The Visitors. (2009). Scorpion TV. "Every Friday night about 800 people, mostly women and children, almost all of them African American and Latino, gather in Manhattan for the long journey to rural New York to visit their loved ones in prison."

Please see our Media guide for more about the Library's collections of documentaries, feature films, training films, and more, in streaming and DVD formats. Please contact the librarian responsible for media, Ellen Sexton, with questions, comments, acquisition suggestions. DVDs may be reserved for classroom use.

Publisher's description: Ifemelu and Obinze are young and in love when they depart military-ruled Nigeria for the West. Beautiful, self-assured Ifemelu heads for America, where despite her academic success, she is forced to grapple with what it means to be black for the first time. Quiet, thoughtful Obinze had hoped to join her, but with post-9/11 America closed to him, he instead plunges into a dangerous, undocumented life in London. Fifteen years later, they reunite in a newly democratic Nigeria, and reignite their passion--for each other and for their homeland.

Publisher's description: In 150 years since end of the Civil War and the ratification of13th Amendment, the story of race and America has remained brutally simple one, written on flesh: it is story of the black body, exploited to create the country's foundational wealth, violently segregated to unite the nation after civil war and today still disproportionately threatened, locked up and killed in the streets. How can America reckon with its fraught racial history? Between The World And Me is Ta-Nehisi Coates' attempt to answer that question.

Description: Oscar is a sweet but disastrously overweight, lovesick Dominican ghetto nerd. From his home in New Jersey, where he lives with his old-world mother and rebellious sister, Oscar dreams of becoming the Dominican J. R. R. Tolkien and, most of all, of finding love. But he may never get what he wants, thanks to the curse that has haunted Oscar's family for generations, dooming them to prison, torture, tragic accidents, and, above all, ill-starred love. Oscar, still waiting for his first kiss, is just its most recent victim. Diaz immerses us in the tumultuous life of Oscar and the history of the family at large, rendering with genuine warmth and dazzling energy, humor, and insight the Dominican-American experience, and, ultimately, the endless human capacity to persevere in the face of heartbreak and loss.

Publisher's description: Raised by a single father, a controversial sociologist at Riverside Community College, he spent his childhood as the subject in psychological studies, classic experiments revised to include a racially-charged twist. He also grew up believing this pioneering work might result in a memoir that would solve their financial woes. But when his father is killed in a shoot-out with the police, he realizes there never was a memoir. All that's left is the bill for a drive-thru funeral and some maudlin what-ifs. Fueled by this injustice and the general disrepair of his down-trodden hometown, he sets out to right another wrong: Dickens has literally been removed from the map to save California further embarrassment. Enlisting the help of the town's most famous resident--the last surviving Little Rascal, Hominy Jenkins, our narrator initiates a course of action--one that includes reinstating slavery and segregating the local high school--destined to bring national attention. These outrageous events land him with a law suit heard by the Supreme Court, the latest in a series of cases revolving around the thorny issue of race in America.

Description: The American classic about a young girl's coming-of-age at the turn of the century. This P.S. edition features an extra 16 pages of insights into the book, including author interviews, recommended reading, and more. -- Serene was a word you could put to Brooklyn, New York. Especially in the summer of 1912. Somber, as a word, was better. But it did not apply to Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Prairie was lovely and Shenandoah had a beautiful sound, but you couldn't fit those words into Brooklyn. Serene was the only word for it; especially on a Saturday afternoon in summer.

The New York Times recently featured a list of 25 great books by refugees. The Lloyd Sealy Library has many of these books in its holdings, so we've highlighted some here for you. Enjoy reading these!

Isabel Allende, The House of the Spirits (1982).Stacks PQ 8098.1 .L54 C313 1985.A best seller and critical success all over the world, The House of the Spirits is the magnificent epic of the Trueba family -- their loves, their ambitions, their spiritual quests, their relations with one another, and their participation in the history of their times, a history that becomes destiny and overtakes them all. (From publisher's description)

Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951). Stacks JC480 .A74 2004 and Reserve JC480 .A74 1994.Suspicious of the inevitability so often imposed by hindsight, Hannah Arendt was not interested in detailing the causes that produced totalitarianism. Nothing in the nineteenth century--indeed, nothing in human history--could have prepared us for the idea of political domination achieved by organizing the infinite plurality and differentiation of human beings as if all humanity were just one individual. ... The Origins of Totalitarianism remains as essential a book for understanding our times as it was when it first appeared more than fifty years ago. (From publisher's description)

Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (1955). Stacks PS3527 .A15 L6 1997.The most controversial classic novel of the 20th century ... Awe and exhilaration--along with heartbreak and mordant wit--abound in Lolita, Nabokov's most famous and controversial novel, which tells the story of the aging Humbert Humbert's obsessive, devouring, and doomed passion for the nymphet Dolores Haze. (From publisher's description)

Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (1953). Stacks K415 .S77 1953This work examines the problem of natural right and argues that there is a firm foundation in reality for the distinction between right and wrong in ethics and politics. (WorldCat)

Joseph Brodsky, Less Than One (1986). Stacks PN 1271 .B76 1986 This collection of essays thrusts Brodsky--heretofore known more for his poetry and translations--into the forefront of the "Third Wave" of Russian emigre writers. His insights into the works of Dostoyevsky, Mandelstam, Platonov, as well as non-Russian poets Auden, Cavafy and Montale are brilliant. While the Western popularity of many other Third Wavers has been stunted by their inability to write in English, Brodsky consumed the language to attain a "closer proximity" to poets such as Auden.The book, which won a National Book Critics Circle Award, opens and closes with revealing autobiographical essay. (Publisher's description)

Reinaldo Arenas, Before Night Falls (1992). Stacks PQ 7390 .A72 Z46313 1994.Arenas recounts a stunning odyssey from his poverty-stricken childhood in rural Cuba and his adolescence as a rebel fighting for Castro, through his suppression as a writer, imprisonment as a homosexual, his flight from Cuba via the Mariel boat lift, and his subsequent life and the events leading to his death in New York. In what The Miami Herald calls his "deathbed ode to eroticism," Arenas breaks through the code of secrecy and silence that protects the privileged in a state where homosexuality is a political crime. Recorded in simple, straightforward prose, this is the true story of the Kafkaesque life and world re-created in the author's acclaimed novels. (Publisher's description)

Cristina Garcia, Dreaming in Cuban (1992). Stacks PS 3557 .A66 D73 1993.A vivid and funny first novel about three generations of a Cuban family divided by conflicting loyalties over the Cuban revolution, set in the world of Havana in the 1970s and '80s and in an emigre neighborhood of Brooklyn. It is a story of immense charm about women and politics, women and witchcraft, women and their men. (Publisher's description)

Loung Ung, First They Killed My Father (2001). Stacks DS 554.8 .U54 2000. From a childhood survivor of Cambodia's brutal Pol Pot regime comes an unforgettable narrative of war crimes and desperate actions, the unnerving strength of a small girl and her family, and their triumph of spirit. (Publisher's description)

Ishmael Beah, A Long Way Gone (2007). Stacks DT516.828 .B43 A3 2007 and browsing collection. In the more than fifty conflicts going on worldwide, it is estimated that there are some 300,000 child soldiers. Ishmael Beah used to be one of them. What is war like through the eyes of a child soldier? How does one become a killer? How does one stop? Child soldiers have been profiled by journalists, and novelists have struggled to imagine their lives. But until now, there has not been a first-person account from someone who came through this hell and survived. In A Long Way Gone, Beah, now twenty-five years old, tells a riveting story ... This is a rare and mesmerizing account, told with real literary force and heartbreaking honesty. (From publisher's description)

Masha Gessen, The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin (2012). Stacks DK510.766 .P87 G47 2012The Man Without a Face is the chilling account of how a low-level, small-minded KGB operative ascended to the Russian presidency and, in an astonishingly short time, destroyed years of progress and made his country once more a threat to her own people and to the world. ... Her account of how a "faceless" man maneuvered his way into absolute-and absolutely corrupt-power has the makings of a classic of narrative nonfiction.

Gary Shteyngart, Little Failure (2014). Stacks PS3619 .H79 Z46 2014.The award-winning author of Super Sad True Story traces his uproarious experiences as a young bullied Jewish-Russian immigrant in Queens, his haphazard college pursuits and his initial forays into a literary career. (Publisher's description)

Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (1944).Stacks HC53 .P6 1957.After settling down to teach at Bennington College, Polanyi published his major work, which looked at how the Industrial Revolution was so disruptive that it created the conditions for both Communism and fascism. But capitalism, he argued, did not happen spontaneously. It required an enormous amount of government planning in order to function. “Laissez-faire was planned,” was his counterintuitive summation. (NYT description)

Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus (1947). Stacks PT2625.A44 D63.A new translation of a 1948 novel by a German writer based on the Faust legend. The protagonist is Adrian Leverkuhn, a musical genius who trades his body and soul to the devil in exchange for 24 years of triumph as the world's greatest composer. (Publisher description)

Theodor Adorno, The Authoritarian Personality (1950). Stacks (BF 323 .D6 A95 1982.Adorno wanted to understand what kind of personality type was susceptible to fascism. He found his answer, via Freud, in a harsh parenting style that led to the kind of person who would crave the approval and guidance of an authoritarian. (NYT description)

A recent New York Times article notes that many classic dystopian novels are rising to the top of sales lists again. At the time of this writing, for instance, George Orwell's 1984 is at the top of the Amazon Best Sellers list. The NYT article posits several reasons why: perhaps the phrase "alternative facts" recalls the Ministry of Truth in 1984, or perhaps "sometimes, it’s nice to be reminded that things could be worse."

Many of the works mentioned in the article are available right here through the Lloyd Sealy Library. If you're in the mood for a dystopian novel, take your pick from the ones below.

Yesterday, the New York Times published a front-page article, "How Reading Nourished Obama During the White House Years." We have quoted parts of the article where Pres. Obama mentions authors and book titles, and noted where you can find these books at John Jay or across CUNY. For authors mentioned, we've pulled out just one or two notable works, but do check OneSearch to see our full holdings for each author.

The writings of Lincoln, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Gandhi and Nelson Mandela, Mr. Obama found, were “particularly helpful” when “what you wanted was a sense of solidarity,” adding “during very difficult moments, this job can be very isolating.” “So sometimes you have to sort of hop across history to find folks who have been similarly feeling isolated, and that’s been useful.”

Abraham Lincoln

Abraham Lincoln: His Speeches and Writings. Located at Stacks E 457.92 1969

An Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments with Truth by Mahatma Gandhi. Located at Stacks DS 481 .G3 A34813 1983 and as ebook

Gandhi in India, in His Own Words. Located at Stacks DS 481 .G3 A3 1987

Nelson Mandela

Long Walk to Freedom: The Autobiography of Nelson Mandela. Located at Stacks DT 1949 .M35 A3 1995

—

Even books initially picked up as escape reading like the Hugo Award-winning apocalyptic sci-fi epic “The Three-Body Problem” by the Chinese writer Liu Cixin, he said, could unexpectedly put things in perspective: “The scope of it was immense. So that was fun to read, partly because my day-to-day problems with Congress seem fairly petty — not something to worry about. Aliens are about to invade!”

In his searching 1995 book “Dreams From My Father,” Mr. Obama recalls how reading was a crucial tool in sorting out what he believed, dating back to his teenage years, when he immersed himself in works by Baldwin, Ellison, Hughes, Wright, DuBois and Malcolm X in an effort “to raise myself to be a black man in America.”

Works (several novels and other writing) by Richard Wright, located at Stacks PS 3545 .R815 1991

W.E.B. DuBois

The Souls of Black Folk, located at Stacks E185.6 .D797 1990 and as an ebook

Black reconstruction (essay), located at Stacks E668 .D83 1956

Malcolm X

The Autobiography of Malcolm X, located at Stacks E 185.97 .L5 A3 1992 and as an ebook

—

Later, during his last two years in college, he spent a focused period of deep self-reflection and study, methodically reading philosophers from St. Augustine to Nietzsche, Emerson to Sartre to Niebuhr, to strip down and test his own beliefs.

To this day, reading has remained an essential part of his daily life. He recently gave his daughter Malia a Kindle filled with books he wanted to share with her (including “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” “The Golden Notebook” and “The Woman Warrior”).

And most every night in the White House, he would read for an hour or so late at night — reading that was deep and ecumenical, ranging from contemporary literary fiction (the last novel he read was Colson Whitehead’s “The Underground Railroad”) to classic novels to groundbreaking works of nonfiction like Daniel Kahneman’s “Thinking, Fast and Slow” and Elizabeth Kolbert’s “The Sixth Extinction.”

The Underground Railroad

Located in many CUNY libraries: check locations or request from catalog (by Colson Whitehead)

Thinking, Fast and Slow

Located at Stacks BF441 .K238 2011 (by Daniel Kahneman)

The Sixth Extinction

Located at Stacks QE721.2 .E97 K65 2014 (by Elizabeth Kolbert)

—

...for instance, he found that Marilynne Robinson’s novels connected him emotionally to the people he was meeting in Iowa during the 2008 campaign, and to his own grandparents, who were from the Midwest, and the small town values of hard work and honesty and humility.

Marilynne Robinson

Housekeeping, located in the Browsing Collection

—

Other novels served as a kind of foil — something to argue with. V. S. Naipaul’s novel “A Bend in the River,” Mr. Obama recalls, “starts with the line ‘The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.’ And I always think about that line and I think about his novels when I’m thinking about the hardness of the world sometimes, particularly in foreign policy, and I resist and fight against sometimes that very cynical, more realistic view of the world. And yet, there are times where it feels as if that may be true.”

A Bend in the River

Located at Stacks PR 9272.9 .N32 B4 1979 (by V.S. Naipaul)

—

He points out, for instance, that the fiction of Junot Díaz and Jhumpa Lahiri speaks “to a very particular contemporary immigration experience,” but at the same time tell stories about “longing for this better place but also feeling displaced” — a theme central to much of American literature, and not unlike books by Philip Roth and Saul Bellow that are “steeped with this sense of being an outsider, longing to get in, not sure what you’re giving up.”

Junot Díaz

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, located at Stacks PS3554 .I259 B75 2007

I was invited to participate in the 2016 Library Leaders Forum[1] which took place at the Internet Archive (IA) in San Francisco the last week of October. John Jay is a digitization partner with the IA, with which we have so far digitized 823 books, serial issues and pamphlets readable on their platform.[2] The first day was a celebration of the 20th birthday of the IA. Subsequent days gave us a deep dive into all the IA projects, which included their well-known website archive called “Wayback Machine” as well as the machines which provide microfilm, audio, film and book digitization. We were also introduced to the newly launched Political Ad Archive[3], which provides searchable coverage of the 2016 election and its aftermath, and GifCities: The GeoCities Animated GIF Search Engine.[4] We also learned about IA initiatives in research data management, website preservation and imaging standards. The forum included a diverse mix which included librarians, data archivists, technology specialists, lawyers, programmers and digital curators.

Take-aways from this conference are services that the Lloyd Sealy Library might consider using, should staff and funding become available, to solve some thorny digitization needs beyond books, which we will continue to digitize with the IA. Possibilities include using the IA’s “Archive It” to digitally preserve John Jay College webpages and submitting video in the College Archives to be preserved on the Moving Image Archive.[5] There is also the possibility of using the IA for digitizing microfilm in our collection, including our Criminal Trial Transcript Collection.

Some libraries have been using the Internet Archive to make post-1923 books that they physically own, digitally available using the IA Open Library[6] platform to lend them to one user at a time. This was called the 1/1/1 rule meaning one physical book can make one digital book which is lent to one user at a time. This has been particularly helpful for making print books digitally available in DAISY format to blind, low vision or other accessibility challenged readers, which has been interpreted as allowed by copyright law. An informative session on copyright implications of such practices was led by Michelle Wu, Law Librarian and Professor, Georgetown University Law Library and Lila Bailey, a legal counsel to the Internet Archive.

The conference included many opportunities to contribute to and shape the Internet Archive’s vision for Libraries in 2020. A white paper on this vision, written by IA founder and director Brewster Kahle – who called it version 0.0 - has been distributed for comment. Links to these and other resources on these topics are provided here: libraryleadersforum.org/learn-more.

I am available to discuss past, present and future Library digitization efforts with any interested member of the John Jay College community. We want these efforts to be helpful and relevant to the curriculum, criminal justice research and our collections as well as responsive to the needs of our patrons as we too move toward 2020. Please email me.

Photo of Library Leaders 2016 participants taken from the ceiling of Internet Archives Headquarters (posted by the IA on Twitter). The IA recently bought and moved into this former church because it looks just like their 20 year old logo (in center of photo).